PLM Solutions Provider in Retail & CPG

Posted by Encora on Dec 26, 2023 12:41:33 AM
Encora’s EDC methodology quickly enhanced low-efficiency legacy product engineering processes, increasing throughput and simultaneously reducing the time and effort required to do quality testing.

Topics: HiTech, Product Engineering & Development, Digital Experience, Test Automation, Quality Engineering, Cloud Services, DevSecOps, CI/CD

Industry Context

Legacy Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) platforms struggle to keep pace as consumer preferences rapidly shift towards supply chain transparency and hyper-personalization. With costs scaling exponentially for managing each new product variant, legacy PLM platforms can significantly strain budgets. Inflexible, tedious upgrade processes can also mean month-long delays when current market windows have been reduced to weeks. These gaps can lead to millions in unrealized revenue.

Industry Context (2)

Client Challenge

Our client, a pioneer in PLM solutions, aimed to transition from legacy architecture to a cloud-based PLM solution to streamline manual deployment processes, expedite onboarding, and grant small to medium-sized customers access to advanced functionalities.

Manual IT processes dragged initial rollout timelines. Upgrades required dedicated developer weeks, delaying immediate access to new features. Lacking an accessible infrastructure, customers had no self-service controls to scale capacity with seasonal order cycles. Modern microservices architecture was essential, but the existing platform contained too much technical debt accrued over decades. Moreover, managing huge infrastructure resources reduced our client's ability to deliver platform enhancements rapidly.

Client Challenge-Dec-26-2023-06-51-37-2285-AM

Approach

Recognizing the challenges posed by legacy PLM platforms, Encora advocated for cloud-based solutions characterized by affordability, agility, and ease of implementation. Seamless integration with Firebase further streamlined development and management experiences, establishing Encora as a holistic option for optimizing infrastructure, strategic services, product engineering, and cloud-based innovations.

  • Infrastructure Optimization: Leveraged Amazon's computational resources, including EC2, RDS, and Application Load Balancers to meet the client’s requirements. Used Terraform to execute various Amazon APIs for on-demand provisioning, scalability, security, and robustness.

  • Product Engineering: Transitioned from a monolithic to a microservices architecture through containerization in alignment with DevSecOps practices. Developed a SaaS solution that included PLM services and cloud-based functionalities like image processing and PDF printing.

  • Product Management: Conducted a thorough analysis of product requirements to devise a strategic roadmap and integrate features to maximize client value. Ensured every aspect of the product aligned with the client's vision and objectives.

  • Cloud Architecture & Engineering: Architected a highly scalable, resilient, and secure AWS platform. Leveraged proven solutions to ensure the architecture met the client’s needs and optimized the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for long-term efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

  • Product Development: Converting a monolithic application into containerized microservices was a strategic move that enhanced flexibility, accelerated release velocity, and fortified resilience. The move towards microservices represented a forward-looking strategy in sync with contemporary development practices.

  • Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): Executed Encora’s iterative DevOps methodology, encompassing thorough assessment, prototyping, infrastructure deployment, and robust Continuous Integration/Continous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.
Encoras Approach-Dec-26-2023-07-03-48-6846-AM

Results

Encora's cloud expertise, combined with AWS’ reliable and elastic infrastructure, enabled the client to reduce costs, drive innovation faster, and provide a future-proof platform to outpace competitors. Automated provisioning enabled instant scalability, while the resilient architecture with automated failover fortified reliability and uptime. Further, accelerated feature release velocity allowed for continuous innovation. The cloud migration and modernization initiative delivered tangible business results across key metrics:

  • 99% decrease in customer onboarding time
  • 100% reduction in hosting costs
  • 300% lower TCO compared to previous on-premise

Additionally, the solution delivered operational excellence including:

  • Superior end-user experience and performance
  • Ability to offer innovative SaaS delivery model
  • Increased infrastructure flexibility and agility
  • Reduced time to market for product enhancements
  • Improved platform security and compliance
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